Transforming Trauma Into Empowerment & Healing Through Creativity with Devorah Brinckerhoff
Episode #27: Show Notes
I had a great conversation with Devorah Brinkerhoff, a professional artist and transformational guide who has developed a truly unique healing methodology called Soul Portraits.
Her approach combines artistic expression with deep spiritual and emotional work to help people transform trauma into empowerment. I was captivated by her story and her transformative process, and I want to share what I learned with you.
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Journey From Gallery Artist to Healer
When I asked Devorah about her transition from being a gallery artist to her current work as a guide, she gave me a fascinating answer. She prefers not to think of herself as a healer, but rather as someone who helps others move through their own challenges. She has always used art and creativity as a way to move through her own unvoiced confusion and pain.
Growing up, Devorah didn't even recognize what she was experiencing as pain. She simply thought it was normal. Her grandmother had attended Pratt, an art school in New York, and was a painter. It wasn't until Devorah was a junior in high school that she discovered art school even existed, when she found a summer program at Wesleyan.
After spending years as a gallery artist, Devorah found herself wanting something more. She explains that while it was great to be in galleries, it never felt like enough. Everything changed when she opened her studio and people began visiting. During these visits, she had meaningful conversations with people about what her artwork brought up in them and how it connected to something deeply within themselves. That felt much more meaningful and purposeful to her.
Why Devorah Left the Gallery World
Devorah's decision to leave galleries and work directly with people on an intimate level wasn't a conscious one. She simply recognized that gallery work wasn't working for her anymore. When she let the galleries know, they weren't particularly happy about it. But for Devorah, it was never anything personal. She really wanted to do more work directly with people on a much more intimate level.
What Are Soul Portraits?
I asked Devorah to describe the Soul Portraits process since I knew pictures of her work wouldn't translate well on a podcast. She told me it's a creative process that she sort of stumbled into during a very difficult time in her life. When everything in her life became complicated and fell apart, she found herself surrounded by materials from lived experience: letters, journals, photographs, and cookbooks. But there were also legal papers and a class action suit that her parents and her husband's parents had brought against them.
This box of material was heavy and upsetting to Devorah. She didn't know how to open it or what to do with it. It's the kind of stuff we put in a box, close it up, and hide in the closet, all while feeling bad about throwing it away. Devorah thought that if she threw it away, she wouldn't actually be dealing with it.
One day, she decided to open that box. While she knew what she was holding and feeling in her body, she wasn't going down a cognitive memory lane. Instead, it was more of a physical experience. She just started ripping things up very naturally. She was gluing them down and writing over it. Hours later, she stood back and realized that she had disassembled her story, made it more digestible, and reassembled it on canvas. Then she painted over it.
The feeling that came over her was transformative. She had moved all this stuck toxic energy (and it wasn't all bad, right? Life is a mix) and it changed everything. She was fortunate to recognize that it really shifted the way she felt about herself.
The Power of Changing Your Relationship to Pain
At the time she received those documents, Devorah's relationship with herself was one of self-loathing. She felt trapped in shame, guilt, confusion, and heartbreak. She assumed she was bad and thought the documents were evidence of her own wrongdoing. That was certainly the perspective she was receiving.
But she discovered something powerful: she could change her relationship to it. And she did this all alone in her studio, with no one else having to see it. She realized that anybody could do this.
After working with herself for a long time, Devorah started creating portraits for other people in her family and then friends. She was amazed by how powerful this process was for people. She had a friend who went through a really nasty divorce who had reams and reams of paperwork about custody and money. They moved through it together. Now Devorah teaches this process to other people.
Understanding Soul Portraits as Mixed Media Art
Essentially, Soul Portraits are mixed media pieces where you let your materials tell your story for you. You're not trying to articulate it or get it right. You don't have to think about it. It's a process that bypasses your thinking mind and goes to your body, where somatic energy gets stuck. And the beauty is that you can move it.
When I asked if this is what she thinks she's tapping into, Devorah explained that she believes all of our lived experiences are recorded in our bodies. We don't stop to take time to really integrate what we live through. We just keep moving forward.
Even with therapy, which Devorah spent many years in, it's still cognitive. You can talk about something, but talking about it doesn't change how your body feels about it. Soul Portraits reach the somatic places and address lived experiences at a somatic level.
Creativity as Connection to Something Greater
Devorah shared something beautiful with me about creativity. While she doesn't think of herself as a spiritual person, she has come to believe that when we tap into creativity, we're tapping into something much larger than any of us. When we tap into ourselves, we're tapping into our divinity.
This is true regardless of how you lose yourself, whether it's cooking or gardening, music, or dance. That's all creativity. As long as we're doing that, we're tapping in and connecting to our greater wisdom. I had never thought about cooking as creativity until Devorah mentioned it, but she's absolutely right.
The Visual Appearance of Soul Portraits
I was curious about whether the words and text on the original documents remain legible after they're ripped up. Devorah explained that it changes and is entirely unique to the person. She also told me that she works with people in two different ways: she guides people in workshop scenarios where they work through the process themselves, or they commission her to create a piece for them.
Both approaches involve personal agency because when you enter into this process, you're agreeing to lean in towards yourself and whatever feels like it's holding you back. The materials become a foundation representing your past, and then you honor that past by writing over it to anchor in who you are today. The painting is about asking what you'd like to call in for your future self.
According to Devorah, the reason painting over the materials doesn't completely erase them isn't about denying or ignoring the past. It's about saying, "I've been with it and I've acknowledged, integrated, and accepted this part of myself with love and compassion. So I am ready to release it."
Some people leave the materials very transparent, so you can go up and read whatever you want. Some people cover it completely. But Devorah emphasized that it's a word just for you, and no one else has to know what it says. Your eye might catch a word while walking by, but that's something meant for you alone.
Are Soul Portraits Only for Trauma?
I asked whether this process is always about trauma events, and Devorah gave me a wonderful answer. She explained that it's not limited to difficult experiences at all. She has had people who want to celebrate 50 years of marriage and want to create Soul Portraits together with their partner. It's so lovely and can be a celebration for very special events.
I shared with her that I have an entire cabinet behind me with my mother's written journals and art sketches and tons of stuff I'm still going through. It's not traumatic for me in the traditional sense, and I wasn't sure what to call it. Devorah said it's about your relationship with the person. It's a way to celebrate or honor your relationship with her and to get to know her better now because you have access to all of that material.
She shared that she has always been fascinated by this kind of material. She would spend hours in thrift stores going through other people's mail from the 1940s, thinking about what those materials represent. Everyone has a story and people are remarkable.
How Emotions Arise During the Process
I was stuck on the mechanics of how emotions arise during a three-hour project. Devorah explained that the feelings are just in you. It's about your willingness to let them move through you. If you allow yourself to revisit a time in your life, for better or for worse, those feelings just show up. But we spend so much time tamping them down, saying we can't feel this now or that an emotion might be inappropriate.
But here's what Devorah wants people to know: there isn't an inappropriate emotion. It's about our willingness to let them move through us and to be acknowledged. If you are not ready for it, it won't resonate with you. Your intuition will let you know that this isn't for you right now. If you feel like the process could help you so much, then it's for you.
The Timeline for Soul Portraits
When I asked about the timeline for someone moving through this process, Devorah said it's really different for everyone. There are people who come in and within three hours they've processed decades. It's incredible.
Workshops are typically three hours, though there is some prep time because people have to gather their materials and supplies. They can get supplies from Devorah if they want, but it's your materials, your story, your life. That's why it's different and why it's powerful, because it's real. You can't make it up. It is what it is.
The journal you wrote in, the journal your mother wrote in, your father's cookbook, a favorite bread recipe, whatever it is, these are tangible materials that hold the energy of the time they were written, received, or read. So people spend some time collecting that. But if they know exactly what they need and where it is, they can spend just 10 minutes gathering boxes of stuff and three hours ripping it up, gluing it down, writing, and painting.
A lot of people hang their finished piece on their wall, but plenty of people rip it up and burn it and have a ceremony that way. You can do whatever feels right to you, and you'll know.
The Healing is in the Process, Not the Product
For people doing this in Devorah's workshops, the healing is coming through the process and has nothing to do with the end product. It's about the process, not the product.
Looking back at her career as an artist, it was always about the process, not the product. If the product ended up being pleasing to other people and sold well, that was great. But then the gallery would ask for more of those pieces, and Devorah would say no because it was done.
Now, people end up loving what they make because when you think back to kindergarten, you weren't judging what you made. You just loved it because you made it. This Soul Portraits process is a very similar thing. Even if it's not perfect, and we have so much fun cooking, baking, and gardening, we don't judge the plant. If it came out wonky, we're just like, "Wow, you came out, you're amazing." Hopefully we extend that grace to our children and to ourselves as well.
In-Person Versus Virtual Soul Portraits Workshops
I asked whether Devorah does group events in person, and she told me it depends. She can do them virtually if people are all over the world. There are pluses and minuses to each format.
In an in-person event, people tend to like the group dynamic of sharing, and they like to have physical access to Devorah to tell her parts of their story that surprised them during the process. That can happen in a virtual landscape as well, though she hasn't figured out how to do breakout rooms if people want a private conversation.
The bonus to a virtual event is that everybody is working in a private space, so their neighbor can't see their work. If you're dealing with things that hold a lot of shame or guilt or feel very unspeakable, people really like the virtual events because they have privacy.
Devorah is located in Portland, Oregon.
What If You Don't Have Documentation?
I was curious about how this process works for people who are feeling universal themes like the "not enoughness" but don't even know where it came from. They don't have the documentation. Devorah has a beautiful answer to this.
She's worked with a gentleman who hadn't kept a single letter from his first wife or his mother, but he had memories of both people. Devorah listened as he spoke about what those relationships meant to him. He's a tremendous human being who had done so many incredible things, but the women in his life were both more powerful than he was, especially as a child, and very cruel.
If you're overpowered by another and dealing with a sense of smallness and unworthiness, reclaiming it is about really being with those feelings. There was a lot of writing that he did on his own that he then gave to Devorah to put into his piece.
People can do free writing on their own. If they show up and don't have any materials, Devorah asks them beforehand if they have anything. If not, she suggests finding materials that would represent the memories they have.
She shared an example of a person whose brother was in foster care with her. She didn't have any documentation. Devorah asked her to look up documentation that reflected her lived experience. Her brother had committed suicide. So Devorah asked if she could make a copy of his death certificate, take a photograph of where he's at rest, find his gravestone, or find material online today that resonates with her and captures her relationship with him and that time period.
That's how they reverse-engineered what her lived experience looked like. According to Devorah, you have all the information in your own body. Your body is a record of your entire life. Every moment of your life is recorded in your body. We just tend to ignore it until it captures us in the form of cancer, back pain, or whatever it is. However it shows up for you is how it's trying to get your attention.
The Inner Voice Exercise
For people who are struggling but don't know where the feeling is coming from, Devorah suggests they don't have to have the answer. It's very much a mind thing to say, "Well, where does this come from?" But it's really about learning to trust the wisdom of your body. When people are anxious, depressed, lethargic, and miserable, sometimes you just have to start somewhere.
Devorah has a free exercise that she often asks people to do as a warmup, called an Inner Voice Exercise. Here's how it works: you just draw an oval on a piece of paper. It doesn't matter if it's a scrap from your recycling bin. In fact, she's had people do Soul Portraits simply from their recycling bins. You don't need fancy materials.
Then you start writing whatever words come to mind. Just let your hand move. Cover the whole page with words, or maybe just three words that show up over and over again. Then start circling those words.
When Devorah did this exercise herself, certain words kept getting circled. The circle was really dark and prominent, and your eye just goes there straight away. She was looking at different words, and one was "duty" or "service," and then next to it was the word "wings." But she kept circling the word "duty," and it was big and dark, and it literally covered over the word "wings."
She realized, "Oh, I'm clipping my wings." It was totally intuitive. She had literally been clipping her wings with duty and obligation and feeling like she had to show up in a certain way. She learned something new about herself through this simple exercise, something she had been doing her entire life. And as someone at midlife, she realized it always shows us something and lets us know that we can pay attention to ourselves in a different way.
Not Feeling Creative?
I asked what Devorah would say to people who feel hesitant to do something like this because they don't feel creative. She loves this question because she wants people to know: we are creative.
She always goes back to the five-year-old who just loved to color when they started using crayons. Nobody cared that it went outside the lines. That's creativity. It just doesn't matter. Everybody has the ability to do this.
Devorah asks if we can give ourselves permission to let go and play. It's just play. She happens to be using glue and paper, but people use crayons all the time. In workshops, they use Sharpies or whatever they have. It's about getting messy because there's so much freedom in that. There's so much joy.
When she was young and living in New England, Devorah made mud pies all the time. She loved playing in the mud. She loves mud season, which is a whole season dedicated to New England that doesn't exist anywhere else that she's aware of. So yeah, it's just play. It just happens to be with paper, glue, and paint. It's all the same. It's about giving ourselves permission to let go, which Devorah thinks we need more and more of these days.
Witnessing People Through Their Healing
I asked what the most surprising reaction Devorah has had or witnessed from someone going through this process. At this point, she said it's really hard to be surprised because she went through the process herself, so those deep emotions she had tried to keep tamped down and locked away for so long just came out.
She says there's nothing that surprises her at this point, and she doesn't mean that in a diminishing way. It's such a privilege to witness people. She's not diminishing her lack of surprise, but rather acknowledging how dynamic and compelling people are. That never ceases to amaze her. How incredible people are.
But what Devorah has realized is that we share common feelings of unworthiness and lack of value and questions about what it means to have unconditional love and forgiveness. It all starts inside. We struggle with the same things. We receive these understandings and questions through different experiences, but they tend to land in very similar places. We feel it as grief, loss, anger, confusion, depression, and anxiety. All of that is just stuck emotion. It's just stuck energy. Working at an energetic level is where transformation happens.
Accountability and Compassion
Devorah shared something profound with me about people dealing with really difficult things, whether that's the suicide of their child, being a war veteran, having a sexual abuse history, or dealing with big, complex trauma. These people often don't believe in their head that they can hold their own story. Those people tend to commission Devorah to create a Soul Portrait for them. It's sort of like healing by proxy where she can show up and hold their materials with so much compassion regardless of what they feel they have done.
There is nothing in someone's story that Devorah has judgment around, and there have been some horrific harms related to their lived experience that they feel they've caused. But the willingness of people to take accountability and lean into the harm they've caused is not only tremendously courageous, it's the first step to learning how to love and forgive themselves. And that is how we create change in the world.
It doesn't start with judgment or condemnation. It starts with really accepting and loving people and knowing that for the most part, the majority of harm we cause is because we have been harmed originally and we have not known how to process that harm. We've all received harm and we have all caused harm, some more than others. And that has nothing to do with being good or bad. It has to do with how we know how to take care of ourselves and how much love and support we've received when we really needed it.
Remarkable Resilience & Self-Discovery
Devorah has an enormous amount of compassion for people who step into this work. It is deep, deep work, and it surprises her how resilient people are. She shared a beautiful example of a woman dealing with her divorce. This woman looked back over her history and at her young self and said it so beautifully. She said, "I'm so surprised to recognize how much I wanted to love, and how maybe naive that love was. But the naivety in and of itself, the intention of it, is such a beautiful thing."
She had remembered it with judgment, criticism, and negativity around her own naivety. But in revisiting those materials from her earlier self, she was hit with such awe for the sweetness of how she approached her marriage. It shifted her relationship with how she had been judging herself to really accepting herself and her story and becoming excited for her next chapter of life and who she is and how to come from this place of excitement rather than smallness, which she had been living in for a lot of years.
Recognizing When You're Ready
Devorah wants people to know that people have a sense of when they're ready for this work. If you're drawn to it, lean into it. You're ready. You don't have to work with Devorah. She's just a way for you to really have yourself, because that is the most important relationship any of us can have. If we're struggling in other relationships, we have to start here, on the inside, with ourselves first.
She shared that when she was in college, she made an incredible lampshade using old silk fabric from a thrift store. She ripped off the silk and went to a clipping file and took out photographs that happened to be of a famous murder case. The way she saw the body reminded her of paper dolls, and in a positive way.
But her system was not ready to deal with what her system knew. Her artwork had always been nudging her towards herself, but she wasn't ready to deal with it. It was always there. If we're not ready, we won't do it. We won't lean in. It won't show up for you if you're not ready. So you don't have to be scared of what shows up, because if you're not ready, it won't show up. Or if it shows up, you might think it's joyful instead of sad or creepy or scary. We have our own protection system.
Trust Your Intuition
People know when they're ready, according to Devorah. So it's very empowering, and it's about following your own voice, your own intuition, yourself. That's why she's always encouraging people to become their own answer.
In the beginning of our conversation, Devorah said she's not a healer because you're your own healer. She's just here to hold space for you and to invite you into this container so that you can be with yourself because you're amazing.
I shared my own philosophy with her, and I think it resonates with most of our listeners: a true healer is just someone who's facilitating others to heal themselves. Everything I've heard from Devorah today is about facilitating healing.
An Invitation
Devorah shared that she's always curious about who people are and how they move through the world and how they can step into their greatest selves. If people have questions, it's really more an invitation. She wants people to reach out because she would love to support people in knowing themselves better and being more comfortable in their own lives.
But most importantly, Devorah wants people to know this: she suffered for so long for so many years with her own relationship with herself, and it was such a prison. If she can help anybody release themselves from their prison, that's her greatest joy.
Meet Our Guest: Devorah Brinckerhoff
Devorah Brinckerhoff is a professional artist and transformational guide who developed Soul Portraits—a healing methodology that combines artistic expression with spiritual work to help people transform trauma into empowerment. With 30+ years as a gallery-represented artist, she discovered her most powerful work emerged when she stopped creating for external approval and began using art to dissolve limiting beliefs. She now guides others through creating their own Soul Portraits, using creative practices to shed old stories and discover their authentic selves. Working from her home studio in Oregon, she facilitates workshops both in-person and virtually, drawing on her own journey through personal trauma to help clients externalize their inner landscape and transform pain into power.
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Jennifer Robin serves as a relatable, down-to-earth, REAL Wellness & Success Coach. She’s not a fancy, perfect makeup, airbrushed kind of woman. She’s been told many times, in a variety of environments, that she’s easy to talk to, and makes others feel welcome and comfortable. Her mission in life is both simple and profound: to make others feel worthy.
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